
She says her mother grew quite attached to the chimp, even breastfeeding him throughout his stay at their house. Jenny Lee, who was 13 years old at the time, remembers her mom, Stephanie LaFarge, raising Nim alongside her and her siblings. The first family to take Nim in lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a giant brownstone. Jenny Lee: 'He Was Just Included In The Family' And the wild animal comes out in him very quickly, and was prepared for that." "And it was quite striking that there wasn't an investigation into what chimpanzees actually were or what they're like. "The premise of the experiment was to treat him as much like a human child as possible and to give him the nurturing of a human child in order he would behave like one," Marsh says. Marsh and two of the people who worked with Nim join Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a discussion about the film and about the controversial experiment. Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim. He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. At that point, researchers said he knew more than 125 ASL signs - but no one knew quite what to do with Nim. In 1977, Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years.
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He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp - he bit the children in the house and didn't understand how to behave like a human child.

The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. It was a freak thing.In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment. How many people go crazy and kill other people? This is one incident that I don't know what happened. “We can give them a blood transfusion, and they can give us one. She replied: “Would I have done it again? Yes! They're the closest thing to humans - to us. Months after the attack, she bravely appeared on Oprah to show her injuries.Īfter the incident, NBC reporter Jeff Rossen asked Sandra: “After what you've been through with this - your friend is in the hospital fighting for her life - do you still think chimps should be pets?" He ran back into the house and collapsed dead on his bed.Īfter paramedics arrived on the scene, they believed Charla - slumped in a pool of her own blood with no recognisable features - was dead.Īfter realising she was still breathing, she was rushed into surgery and underwent a 72-hour operation while surgeons attempted to reconstructĬharla now lives in a care home with a new face and will rely on carers to look after her for the rest of her life. He opened one of the police car doors and lunged at an officer.ĭespite being shot four times at point-blank range Travis didn't die straight away. When the police arrived, Travis continued on his rampage. Rishi Sunak under huge pressure to solve 'pensions minefield' Iran slammed for doing the Houthi's 'dirty work' in UAE attack Taliban show their true colours as women pepper sprayed in street Sandra recalls: "He looked at me like, 'Mom, what did you do?"

In a desperate attempt to get the primate off her friend, the then 70-year-old grabbed a shovel and hit him over the head, and even stabbed him in the back.


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Sandra, who was the only one to witness the full attack, claimed Travis approached Charla aggressively before getting on his hind legs, throwing her against the side of her car before launching the savage attack. Travis had known Charla - who was 55 at the time - for several years but she had recently changed her hair around the time of the attack and there are claims he had become startled by this and lashed out. However, just six years later they would be proved very wrong when the grown-up chimpanzee attacked Charla. Luckily, he didn't manage to catch the person but it took police several hours to entice him back to his owners and the incident led to a new law being passed in Conneticut - no one could own a primate weighing more than 50lbs.Įven though Travis showed concerning behaviour, he was allowed to stay with his owners after the authorities decided he didn't pose a threat.
